This CPA Gets to Watch Live Music in His Office

BY KATHLEEN HOFFELDER, NJCPA SENIOR CONTENT EDITOR

Gregory Levine, CPA, hadn’t originally planned on becoming a CPA nor did he set his sights on the music industry. Those two paths simply came together.

Greg, who would not have it any other way, is now a senior director of finance at The Orchard, an independent distribution arm of Sony Music Entertainment. He sees the nuances of his early career as laying the groundwork for where he is today. Take his first job in tax at Arthur Andersen in 2000. Before the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, Greg realized that valuations excited him more than just tax. “I started in media entertainment in tax but after about a year I moved into valuations. The valuations group was more finance focused. It had the technical accounting, but we also did goodwill impairment testing, financial modeling and discounted cashflow modeling. It was a different atmosphere than tax,” he says.

Fast forward to when Greg landed a job at BMG Entertainment. His valuation experience and having a music client previously came in handy when he was hired into a corporate accounting role at BMG, where he performed high-level deal analysis. According to Greg, his group was responsible for giving deal advances to artists for their content. At that time, “they wanted to centralize all of the various deals out of BMG and wanted a central team to review and analyze that kind of information,” he explains.

BMG merged with Sony Music Entertainment in 2005, and Greg began working in corporate accounting for Sony. That was when he decided to become a CPA — having a boss who was also a CPA helped. “In order to stay competitive, I really needed to get my CPA,” he says. Greg’s boss was also able to sign off on his accounting work experience, which was needed for the license. “The fact that I worked for a CPA made the transition to get my sign-off and license much easier.”

Greg stayed at Sony for more than 12 years, moving eventually to the global digital finance department, which focused on their key digital providers (such as Spotify, Apple and Amazon) and making sure digital revenue was properly recorded on their front-line labels’ books (Columbia, Epic, RCA, etc). “They were like shared services but on the revenue side,” he explains. At Sony, Greg worked on interesting label purchases, notably the heavy metal label, Relapse Records.

When the CFO asked him to join his team at The Orchard, Greg remembers him saying, “I need somebody that understands digital accounting and the systems that Sony uses,” noting that there were many opportunities at such a large company. When he made the leap to The Orchard, Greg was able to see all the different parts in accounting since it is run as a separate business unit. “We’re dealing with payables and receivables and oversee the invoice and revenue processing for all the digital stores. We license everything for our digital stores,” he says. “We have some owned content where we process royalties, but most of it is a distributed business model versus Sony, where they own the content for the artist. We’re onboarding smaller companies to our Orchard platform, distributing their content, taking over their invoicing — constantly working with the tech department to scale our systems.” The Orchard has an office in the U.K., where they work with the tax department. “It’s more interesting than general accounting,” he maintains.

Working on smaller accounts has some advantages too. “We get to watch live music in our Orchard offices almost every week (smaller artists trying to break out). That is probably most fun to watch a band perform at 4 p.m. on a Thursday and then go home,” says Greg, who lives in Holmdel with his wife, Andrea, and children, Seth (13) and Sienna (11).

MONDAY, MAY 8 | 12:30 P.M.

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